I fell bad that I haven't posted a lot of what had been on my mind lately, and i wanted to share what is going on.
In my mind, I am realizing that there is a new technology that I believe is going to be making a BIG, BIG impact on developers who work with lots of data: WPF. Over the last 18 months or so, I've been experimenting with WPF, and have created several major applications at work using WPF. And, the more I use it, the more I realize that this is really the future of UI work, especially for the people, like me, who work with lots of data heavy apps.
WPF had a pretty rough start. The initial demos of the technology highlighted ridiculous and worthless things like spinning buttons and the WPF support in Visual Studio is buggy and far behind the tool support for things like WinForms. It didn't even have basic controls like a non-beta rich data grid until October 2008.
But, despite all of the warts that the "1.0" version of WPF has, it is a technology that is very easy to fall in love with. I will begin elaborating on why in future posts.
I am currently writing my first big developer talk on how WPF and SQL can go hand in hand. I'll be presenting it in April to the Cedar Falls user group and then again at the Iowa Code Camp in May.
Most importantly for this blog, I have added a new category for my thoughts on WPF, and you can expect to see good content here soon.